There are many causes for Detroit’s financial woes. Some go back decades. The main one is the declining tax base due to the shrinking middle class, meaning higher taxes for those left. The shrinking middle class, hardly unique to Detroit, but certainly exacerbated there, is due in the turn to any number of things: the cyclical downturns of the auto industry, racial upheavals, crime, fiscal mismanagement, public perception, depressed national ecomony, poor schools and others. To blame it primarily on “overly generous union contracts” is simply nonsensical.
I suspect that a not insignificant factor in this was caused by white flight – middle class whites fleeing the city in order to avoid racial integration of the public schools, among other things.
Why in the world would anyone compromise before it was clear that the people on the other side of the table were willing to “play hardball”? What the fuck kind of negotiating tactics did you learn and where?
I’ll agree that this is not exactly up-front and 100% on the level since the group seems to be using what may be a real issue (the way signatures are gathered by paid-per-sig registrars and what happens to the info people give) to also promote their own, un-expressed views.
I’ll counter with Wisconsin’s Republican governor manufacturing a financial crisis last year so he could subvert democracy directly with the aid of Republican elected officials. I’ll add that he lied to the media in a deliberate attempt to slander Democrats and people opposed to his “reform measures” by saying that “professional activists” were being bussed into the state just to pad the number of protestors. I’ll further add that he sought to siphon off his state’s resources and property, primarily in the form of power plants that the citizens are dependent on, to his wealthy out-of-state backers.
I’ll let readers decide which side’s “dirty tricks” were worse.
Following that link goes to a story by Steven Greenhut, who was a columnist for the Orange County Register (CA) for over 10 years. Orange County is one of the most rabidly Republican places in America. He is currently, according to the article, vice president of journalism for the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity.
My research shows that he has also written a book blaming unions for many things: Plunder: How Public Employee Unions are Raiding Treasuries, Controlling Our Lives and Bankrupting the Nation, numerous articles blaming President Obama for trampling states rights and is the contributing editor for calwatchdog.com, a supposedly non-partisan journalistic endeavor that apparently doesn’t write stories critical of Republicans or Republican policies, although they do seem to write a lot about how bad unions and Democrats are. I particularly liked the piece about how California should auction off it’s parks.
[
](Auction Off State Parks | CalWatchdog.com)
:rolleyes:
My research shows that the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, supposedly committed to journalistic excellence, was founded by Jason Stverak, former Executive Director of the North Dakota Republican Party and a longtime GOP operator.
Further research shows that the Sam Adams Alliance was founded by Eric O’Keefe, who is a big proponent of taking away or at least limiting people’s right to be represented by the person of their choice. What I mean is, he is a big proponent of term limits. He authored the book Who Rules America: The People Versus the Political Class which argues that institutionalizing that all legislators be new to the job would somehow improve government services. Also O’Keefe is a director of the Club For Growth Wisconsin, a group which has spent $1 million on TV ads to support Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s effort to make state workers “pay their fair share.”. So yeah, he helped spend more than $1 million dollars to further Gov. Walker’s agenda to destroy collective bargaining rights last year.
None of these people (nor their related organizations) strike me as particularly non-partisan or without an axe to grind against unions in particular, so you’ll pardon me if I don’t accept the unsubstantiated declarations in the articles you linked to.
Whoops!
Forgot to mention instances of anti-union bullying, like how Indiana Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Cox suggested on Twitter that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker should have riot police use live ammunition against pro-union protesters last year.
Or how about Carlos Lam, a Deputy Prosecutor in Indiana’s Johnson County, suggesting in an email that Governor Walker should mount a “false flag” operation which would make it appear as if the union was committing violence.
You feel free to let me know how many times unions have been able to call out police forces or state militias to shoot into crowds of people, massacring men, women and children.
You want to continue to play the “unions are terrible, evil entities” game? I’ll show you what the the people they are up against are like.
You think unions strong-arm people? I’ll show you how anti-union people kill and maim and cripple their opponents and their opponent’s supporters.
Unions aren’t perfect, but they aren’t to blame for nearly as much violence, waste, fraud and deceit as anti-union people are.
Unions exist because of the abuses and disregard experienced by workers. And without unions, those abuses and the callous disregard exhibited in the past by employers will return.
In fact, if you want to blame unions for things, you should also blame the assholes who couldn’t (and can’t) bring themselves to treat other people as, ya know, people so that unions are necessary at all.
Maybe he’ll sing you that song about Joe Hill, the management trainee given a brutal wedgie by union thugs…
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night
Still walking with a limp
One nut the size of the Hindenburg
The other just another blimp…
If you think the choice of voting between one invidual nominated and entirely supported by the vested interests of the owners of capital, and another of the same, is ‘democracy’ in any meaningful sense good luck.
Democracy died in the USA a long time ago.
I have another, related question: when cities like Detroit have the ability to demand money from the state government, isn’t that taxation without representation? This is happening in a lot of places-here in Massachusetts, we have an insolvent city called Lawrence. The state is now paying the Lawrence school teachers salaries, and is providing a $36 million subsidy to the city. This is not helping-Lawrence continues to decline (due to high unuionized labor costs and a totally corrupt mayor and city council). Is it democracy when taxpayers are made to subsidize a criminal orgaization?
Have you stopped beating your wife?
Perhaps there’s something I’m missing here. Detroit and other Michigan cities are at or getting close to bankruptcy. The only way out is to renegoiate union contracts so that the public employees get less money. You agree, here, that the unions won’t make the necessary compromises unless the state government “plays hardball”, meaning threatens to take over the city’s finances and make the necessary cuts. Does that mean you’re in favor of the state government appointing managers? If not, then what are you saying?
I don’t quite see what this has to do with Michigan state appointing managers to take over the finances of Michigan cities when it’s the only way to prevent those cities from going bankrupt.
“Research” wasn’t really necessary here. The articles I linked to were all from Reason, a libertarian magazine. That alone ought to be sufficient to alert you that those who wrote the articles probably aren’t Democrats. But if you find that going after the people who present the argument against public sector unions in Detroit is a better tactic then actually making an argument to defend those unions, that seems to me a likely indication that the unions are indefensible.
ITR champion, we ask that posters not alter text inside the quote boxes like you’ve done here. Please don’t do this again.
Really? “Considering the source” isn’t something you do? So, if I were to quote an article that said, say, black people were more aggressive and had lower IQs and were ten times more likely to rape yer white women than any other race, the fact that it was written by the editor of “KKK Monthly” is something you wouldn’t point out as possible evidence against its validity?
I disagree that is the only way out of the dire financial situations that some cities are experiencing, and I disagree that they are the main reason that the situations occurred. Thus far, you seem to think that this is a priori knowledge and does not require any factual information to back it up. In that, you would be wrong.
No, I don’t agree with that. What I said is that any other stance in negotiations other than not being willing to make concessions that will hurt you unless absolutely necessary is ridiculous.
Baseball Star: I want US$4 billion per year, a jet, a mansion built on top of the Empire State Building and a pet bear trained to dance like that guy from LMFAO, or I won’t play for your team.
Team Owner: Gee, I could prolly do all that, but would you settle for $10 per game and an apartment in Queens behind a liquor store? It would really help me stay fabulously wealthy if you’d agree to work for a pittance.
Baseball Star: Okay! Sure!
You seem to think that would be good and proper negotiating on the part of the Baseball Star. It wouldn’t; it would be stupidity at it’s finest.
I’m saying that your notion of what’s at fault, how it should be remedied, who caused even the thing you perceive as the sole problem (somehow you moved past “part of the problem”, sped past “biggest part of the problem” and arrived like it was home plate at “only thing that is a problem”) and how negotiations should work are all ludicrously ill-informed and unbelievably naive.
Again, you think this is the only way to prevent those cities going bankrupt, which means you think that public employee pay is the only thing causing the problem. Thus far, you have yet to show that is the case, mostly because you already believe it to be true, without any set of compelling facts set forth to bolster, let alone prove, your underlying assumptions.
By “libertarian magazine” you seem to mean “anti-Democratic Party magazine” or “pro-Republican Party magazine”. I’ve laid out a good case that the writers you reference are highly partisan with an axe to grind against unions in particular. Their conclusions come without statistical clarity because they simply accept as fact that unions are bad, and then they try and make their arguments fit their conclusions. The problem is that their argument is mostly just re-stating their conclusion, and then crowing about how that supports their conclusion.
I recognized their names, by the way. They’ve been making arguments for years and years about how unions are bad, and expensive, and full of lazy shiftless people who just want to get paid lots of money for doing nothing, and how welfare mothers are bankrupting the country, and how much better off everyone would be without a minimum wage, etc. etc. etc. That’s why I went and did enough research to show that, yes, they have an agenda and are trying to further it. And no, the agenda isn’t “strengthen democratic institutions”; it’s “strip power from democratic institutions and consolidate it into the hands of people who think like we do”.
You want to know a big reason why democracy may be dying not just in Michigan, but all over the country? Because people like the authors you linked to have been doing whatever they can to help kill democratic institutions, like unions and American city, county, and state governments (and the US federal government) for decades.